Just a random idea I'm throwing at here, but I think a Lunar 0 featuring Dyne and Ghaleon should be focused on masks.

Eiffel seemed awfully obsessed with masks, with masks representing the 5 princes of the black star, and he himself wearing a mask. It could further be used as symbolism to describe Ghaleon's personality as well, possibly in big contrast to how he's illustrated in Lunar 1 and 2.

What do you think?

On the subject of a Lunar 0 and Eiffel, I want to know what all the useless plot devices they introduced are, such as the magic forge, and underwater sea palace or whatever it was. But I guess that might be offtopic?

Lishy wrote:On the subject of a Lunar 0 and Eiffel, I want to know what all the useless plot devices they introduced are, such as the magic forge, and underwater sea palace or whatever it was. But I guess that might be offtopic?

Off-topic? Not at all!

So, the whole five princes of the Black Star thing... Much of that is totally new and unreferenced anywhere else in the Lunar lore (five princes or a "Black Star"). But their design was very reminiscent of Zophar. I'm thinking a group of demigods -- since the Four Heroes were said to have taken down a demigod -- with power from the same dark source as Zophar's. The masks, I figure, are just the manifestation of those demigods; Eiffel's obsession with masks might just be an outcome of that. (Or maybe another source? This last part is totally theory.)

Re: the magic forge / mystic oven, that's totally new too.

The underwater palace, though... that's sort of referenced in the novels. Sort of. The "Leviathan" in the SSS novels was a mechanical underwater ship (ok, submarine, but underwater ship sounds more steampunk) that the Vile Tribe used, designed by Taben. The "Leviathan" in Silver Star Harmony was something slightly different (underwater fortress, so it didn't move) but still an underwater thing used by the Vile Tribe.

Given Shigema's penchant for messing with his own story in each remake, his idea for the Leviathan of the novels could be what morphed into his idea for the Leviathan of SSH. KF

Thinking about these things, Lunar 0 shouldn't necessarily need to be a bad game just because it lacks Lunar's original developers. Much of making it good would be common sense.

Give it tweaked mechanics based off of Eternal Blue Complete (Perhaps with the ability to customize your spells more?), then simply make a plot with a bunch of philosophical questions about Karma and identity (Hence mask importance?)

It really doesn't sound like they need the original developers for a Lunar 0 as long as they don't try to reinvent the wheel. Classic JRPG fun! Play it safe and use an engine similar to the Complete games.

(With that in mind, SSH was a bad experiment at that due to horribly watered down map design, annoying load times between rooms, and general weirdness like black frames when you talked to people. Why did they kill the map designs so badly? Grindery 1 was over when it just started!)